


of the blissfully dead

by bawling



Series: 1989 [2]
Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-05-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 02:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14761154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bawling/pseuds/bawling
Summary: Eddie Kaspbrak does not understand The Cure. Richie Tozier remembers Adrian Mellon.





	of the blissfully dead

**Author's Note:**

> fair warning there are quite a few slurs in here because there's a pretty crucial connection to chapter 2 after the festival (1984) from the book! ironically it's way happier than part 1
> 
> questions? comments? concerns? ask [@butcheleven](http://butcheleven.tumblr.com)

_Softly through the shadow of the evening sun_  
_Stealing past the windows of the blissfully dead_  
_Looking for the victim shivering in bed_

*

**November 1989**

Eddie Kaspbrak does not understand The Cure.

He’s pacing back and forth on the Kissing Bridge, Ben’s Walkman clutched tightly in one hand and the New Kids On the Block tape that he’d forgotten to remove before he handed it over to Eddie this morning in the other. The flimsy headphones over his ears are playing some tinny rock ballad about Spider-Man eating him for dinner.

Is this seriously what Richie steals the Walkman to listen to day in and day out? He must be way more disturbed than Eddie realized. Fucking batshit, probably.

The Walkman has become somewhat of a hot commodity among the Losers since the start of the school year. So much so that they’ve been forced to implement a Walkman schedule in order to stop _certain individuals_ from _hogging_ the fucking thing any chance they get.

It goes something like this:

Mike – Saturday  
Ben – Sunday, Monday  
Stanley – Tuesday  
Bill – Wednesday  
Richie – Thursday  
Eddie – Friday

Except that the schedule hasn’t exactly been effective so far. 

They still meet up at the Barrens almost every weekend, which means Richie usually has no trouble fishing the Walkman out of Ben’s backpack when he and Mike aren’t watching, not that either of them mind.

Tuesdays have remained strictly off limits. Stan is the only one of them that never lets Richie get away with his bullshit, and that includes wrangling an extra Walkman day out of the week despite the fact that Stan has zero interest in using the Walkman on his designated day, which Richie knows.

Bill almost always forfeits his day to Richie after he complains loudly about his free fourth period on Wednesdays, and how he’ll be so bored he’ll be forced to blow their gym teacher, Mr. Bern, because his _delicate physique reminds me of dear old Sonia K_.

Thursdays are un _fucking_ bearable. They’re a continuous stream of Richie’s long (and unusually loud, since he refuses to remove his headphones while talking) soliloquies dedicated to Robert Smith (“the most underappreciated genius of the _modern era_ , Eds”), and quotes from articles in obscure music magazines sent to him by Bev, and dubiously researched facts about the history of British-American crossover success.

Friday is the one day of the week Eddie can listen to his mom’s copy of the Beaches soundtrack and no one, not even Richard _fucking_ Tozier, can stop him from enjoying Bette Midler loudly and on repeat. That is unless Richie _forgot to bring the Walkman with me this morning_. Or _accidentally ate it for breakfast_. Or _left it in bed with your mom last night, Kaspbrak_. Or any of the other pathetic excuses Richie tries to play off on him on his, Eddie Kaspbrak’s Walkman day, the prick.

But not today. No siree bob.

He'd spent all last weekend raking leaves off his neighbors’ lawns (in dish gloves, a helpful addition from his mother who’d insisted he’d get splinters without them) to make some extra money for a new tape. The Batman soundtrack had just come out—twelve _blissful_ Prince songs for him to dance to in his room alone. He had enough allowance saved of course, but there was no reason to spend it all at once. According to Richie, there was no reason to spend anything at all, since he’d offered to sneak the tape out of the electronics store in his weather-inappropriate cargo shorts, and didn’t back down until Eddie yelled for Mr. Harrison, the shop owner, and Richie had to scramble to get it back out of his pants.

The anxiety of bringing his lawn-raking money to school, even if it was only ten dollars, was simply too much for Eddie to stand through a whole day of class. So as soon as the bell rang, he’d yelled goodbye to the rest of the Losers and raced home on his ten-speed. He had to climb the rose trellis up to his bedroom window to avoid his mother. She would never let him leave if she caught him home this early on a Friday.

Eddie arrived at Harrison Electronics a few minutes before 4:00. He went straight to the back wall, where all the tapes and vinyl records were organized neatly by genre and alphabetized by album name, which Eddie appreciated. He stood for a minute admiring all the colorful paper spines housed behind glossy hard plastic. His eyes followed the marked tabs up the shelving unit until he hit B, and he reached for the singular black tape sandwiched between bright patterns.

That’s when he saw it out the corner of his eye.

A few dozen tapes to his right, just past the D tab, there was another black tape. Curiosity got the better of him and he shuffled towards it, pulling it down from the shelf and holding it out between his thumb and forefinger.

_The Cure – Disintegration_

Eddie knew next to nothing about The Cure other than what he’d heard from Richie, who talked about this tape like it was God’s gift to the human race. He wondered what the big deal was, if it was really as life changing as Richie said it was, or if he was full of it like usual. He gave a last resigned glance towards the Batman cassette and approached the register.

Mr. Harrison eyed him strangely as he rung Eddie up for the tape. His son Dem, who's a year older than Eddie in school, wandered out from the shop’s backroom and peered over his father’s shoulder.

“What the hell, Kaspbrak? I knew you were queer but I didn’t know you were some goth freak, too.”

“Language, Dem.”

Mr. Harrison sounded like he minded the word _queer_ about as much as he minded a fresh cup of coffee and a cigarette in the morning. He retrieved Eddie’s change from the drawer, but hesitated before he dropped the cassette and coins into Eddie’s outstretched palm.

“Son, are you sure this is the one you want? We just got in a new shipment of—”

“For your information,” Eddie had to stand on his toes to lean over the counter and snatch his tape and change out of Mr. Harrison’s hand. “The Cure is one of the most successful British crossovers in music history and this tape is certified _silver_ in the U.K.”

Eddie doesn't have a clue what any of that means, but the stupid look on Dem Harrison’s face had been immensely satisfying. He doesn’t give a shit about Richie’s shitty favorite band, but he has his _pride_ dammit.

That’s how he ended up here, in Bassey Park, listening to some weird, sad British man sing about Spider-Man. Dem Harrison can go fuck himself as far as Eddie’s concerned, but it’s possible he may have been onto something i.e. goth freaks.

He’s just about to cut his losses and, god forbid, try and enjoy some New Kids On the Block, when part of the song catches his attention.

 _His arms are all around me and his tongue in my eyes_  
_Be still, be calm, be quiet now my precious boy  
_ _Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more_

Something unfamiliar shoots down Eddie’s spine.

He feels _sad_. Kind of. Does he feel sad? It seems like sadness, but it’s not entirely unpleasant. The cavity of his chest feels wrong, like something’s missing, but he didn’t realize it until just now. He wills away the edge of panic that says _you’re sick_ and rewinds the tape to listen to the words again.

The first thing they bring to mind is Richie, and not just because this is his favorite tape. He thinks about Richie a lot, picks over stupid things he does during the day, dog-ears pages in his comics that he wants to show him when he sneaks through his window later.

This is a different kind of thinking.

He’s thinking about that morning in Bill’s room a few weeks ago. He thinks about that a lot, too. He hasn’t said anything about it to either of them. It still makes him feel sour in his stomach sometimes. Sour enough to avoid Richie’s eyes for no real reason. Sour enough that sometimes he sounds a little too serious when he tells Richie to shut the hell up.

He’s thinking about how Richie’s starting to knock at his window less often. How his eyes are looking more tired than they usually do. Eddie doesn’t know exactly what any of that means, but he knows Richie, and he knows it's not good.

The feeling slips away from him and his brain tunes back into the man on the tape. He’s singing about Spider-Man again.

“Fucking bullshit.”

*

Richie Tozier remembers Adrian Mellon.

He was only seven years old in 1984, but it was old enough to catch patches of conversation on the playground and broken sound bytes from the Derry evening news. The big black-and-white picture of a body facedown in the canal on the front page of the Derry Herald made the biggest impression—he can still see it when he closes his eyes. But what Richie remembers most about the whole ordeal is that no one in Derry really cared.

_He was a cock sucker. Town’s better off without him._

Richie didn’t have a fucking clue what a queer was when he was seven. He only knew it was what the bullies had been calling him every day at recess since forever. He wondered if there was a difference between being called a faggot in class and being called one on television.

As it turned out, yeah. There was a difference. A fucking big one. It was the difference between being some nameless loser in the halls at school and being dead. Adrian Mellon’s bloated corpse on the front page of the Derry Herald made that difference pretty fucking clear.

Richie Tozier will never fucking forget it.

Maybe he remembers Adrian Mellon because of how Bassey Park changed after his death, even if no one else noticed it. The cops have made more of an effort (which is to say, any effort at all) to control the worst of the graffiti scrawled across the public benches in big, remedial red letters:

_AIDS FROM GOD YOU HELLBOUND HOMOS!!_

But the underbelly of Derry’s rhetoric didn’t stop, it just migrated. It’s underneath the Kissing Bridge where, if you’re looking for it, you’ll find the truly stomach-turning shit. What’s left of it, anyway. Most of it’s covered up by newer graffiti—the names of kids from Derry High School that probably fucked right here where Adrian died, face down in a muddy ditch.

Richie can just make out _STICK NAILS IN EYES OF ALL FAGGOTS (FOR GOD)!_ from where he’s sitting with his knees drawn up on the shallow bank of the canal. It’s faded and barely readable after five years, but it’s still there. It’s been there ever since he started coming to this spot when he was ten. At first it was just to hide from Bowers and Hockstetter—he’d slipped between the wooden bars and dropped down underneath before they made it onto the bridge. He’d been knee-deep in canal water but safe. No one noticed when he showed up an hour after dinner, shivering and covered in mud.

He finds himself coming back here more and more often, addicted to whatever fucked up comfort he finds in remembering. Sometimes he comes just to read the filthy words, spends hours wondering who wrote them, and how long ago. Maybe they were the last thing Adrian saw before he died. Maybe whoever wrote them was the one who offed him.

And there it is, the _real_ reason Richie remembers Adrian Mellon. The reason that always skirts around his thoughts no matter how many times he pushes it away. The feeling in the pit of his stomach that maybe there was no _who_ killed him after all. That, give or take five years, Adrian never really had a chance.

Goosebumps explode over the skin of his torso and down his legs.

_It’s gone now. It’s gone. You’re okay, Rich. You’re okay._

He focuses on the rhythm of the canal water splashing against his toes, creeping slowly nearer to his dry patch on the bank. He really needs something to listen to. He reaches for his backpack and then remembers that Ben’s Walkman isn’t in there, because _it isn’t your fucking turn, Tozier. It’s mine. Me. Eddie Kaspbrak, asshat_.

Richie feels the corners of his mouth tug into a smile. Eddie’s fucking _face_ when he caught Richie trying to smuggle the Walkman out of the back pocket of his jeans in the lunch line—the blotchy red of his cheeks and the angry furrow between his eyebrows he only gets when Richie pushes within an inch of his _absolute_ limit. He can practically hear the soft shuffle of Eddie’s sneakered feet pacing back and forth, the way he does when he wants to sit down but the lack of clean, sittable options prevents him from doing so.

No, hang on, he actually _can_ hear it. Someone is pacing on the Kissing Bridge overhead. And at practically the exact same moment he notices the footsteps, Richie hears a familiar voice from directly above him.

“Fucking bullshit.” 

*

Eddie Kaspbrak does _not_ scream like a girl.

Richie Tozier is just a stupid jerkoff who jumped up onto the railings of the Kissing Bridge out of nowhere and scared the living shit out of him. Who the hell hangs out under a bridge on a Friday afternoon? Or like, ever?

“Jesus H. _Christ_ , Richie! You almost gave me a fucking heart attack.”

Eddie scrambles to shove the Walkman back into the pocket of his jeans before he remembers that he’s still wearing the headphones. He rips them off and stuffs them out of sight. He doesn’t want Richie to get any ideas. Not that he cares if Richie knows he’s listening to his favorite tape.

At the moment he’s too busy cracking himself up to notice anything fishy. 

“Jesus, you should’ve seen your _face_ , Eds.”

Richie pushes his glasses back up his nose with one hand. The other is still holding on to the top railing of the bridge. Eddie gets a violent urge to push him right off the edge. Instead, he walks over and rests his elbows on the railing so he and Richie are face to face. Richie leans back in with his other hand so that Eddie is sandwiched in between his skinny arms.

“What the fuck are you doing down there? Where is everyone?”

“One question at a time, my good man! I’ll take where is everyone for three-hundred, Alex.”

His voice flickers from British Guy to Jeopardy Contestant mid-sentence like a bad fuse, the way it only does when he’s really fucking nervous. Eddie looks at him curiously. They’re the same height from this vantage point. It makes Eddie feel like he has the upper hand, even though Richie’s the one who surprised _him_.

Richie screws up his face as he ticks off each Loser on his muddy fingers.

“Bill’s back to being in his existential crisis aka writing in his diary or whatever it is he does these days. Stan’s doing some Jewish thing, I can’t remember, I wasn’t really listening. Mike’s shadowing Mrs. Starrett in the library again. Ben went with him. And Bev, as you known, is living the glamorous city life in grand ol’ Portland and is apparently too fucking busy to take my Friday phone call.”

“Wait, you call Bev every Friday?”

Richie continues without answering him.

“As for myself, I’m just reminiscing about the time I fucked Jennifer Hayes down here after school last week.”

“The new girl from Indiana? You’re so full of shit, Rich.”

Eddie’s insides run cold for a split second thinking about Jennifer Hayes and her straight blonde hair, flowing smoothly down her back from underneath the navy beret she wears to match her button-down wool coat. What makes it worse is that she’s actually really _nice_. Eddie sits next to her in algebra, and she usually asks to work with him on problems they’re assigned. He always catches Richie staring from where he’s paired up with Bill across the room.

Eddie notices Richie’s smile droop a little. He bends his knees and hangs down, looking up at Eddie through his long, dumb eyelashes.

“You like her though, don’t you?”

“Who?”

Richie rolls his eyes in the most dramatic way possible. 

“Wait, you think I like _Jennifer_? Jesus, Rich. _No_.” Eddie’s so thoroughly confused by the look of shock on Richie’s face that he almost bursts out laughing. “I thought _you_ liked her!”

“No!”

“Oh.” Eddie pauses, then looks at him with narrowed eyes. “Then why are you always watching her like a hawk during math class?”

Richie just shrugs. Eddie swears he sees his cheeks get a little pinker. He unhooks his hands from the railing and drops back down onto the bank. Eddie has to lean over the railing on tiptoes to see him down there. 

“You wanna see something?”

Richie’s got that look in his eye that means he’s up to something he _knows_ Eddie wouldn’t like. It’s an effective strategy—there’s nothing Eddie hates more than being underestimated, and Richie knows it. Eddie grumbles to himself as he ducks his head between the bars and shimmies his way onto the ledge. He lowers himself down and lands next to Richie.

It’s dark down here. It’s nearing sundown, probably close to 5:00, but that’s not why. It’s the kind of darkness you can _feel_ more than you can see. It smells, too. There's a scent that Eddie can’t quite place, but he still has to force himself to suppress a gag. The whole experience makes him want to douse himself in disinfectant. 

Eddie turns his head towards Richie, but Richie doesn’t notice. He’s staring at something very intently on the underside of the bridge opposite them. Eddie follows Richie’s gaze. It’s hard to make anything out, he has to squint hard. His eyes take a few seconds to adjust before he sees the messy sprawl of handwriting:

_SHOW ME YOUR COCK QUEER AND I’LL CUT IT OFF YOU_

Eddie suddenly feels much closer to being sick than he did from the smell. He drags his eyes along the rest of the wall. It’s covered in messages, in all different handwriting. There’s names and innocuous insults mixed up with really nasty stuff that makes his stomach curdle.

“Christ. How’d you find this place, Rich?”

Richie just shrugs again. He’s still looking at the words. His eyes look glazed over, like he’s trying hard to remember something. Eddie wants to ask him what he’s thinking. For someone who never shuts up, he almost never says what’s going on in there.

“Who do you think wrote all this?”

“I don’t think it was just one someone, Eds.” Richie answers without looking at him. His voice sounds serious. It makes Eddie feel a little scared. “I’m not sure it was a someone at all.”

“Some kids killed a guy down here, you know. Back when we were little.”

When Richie finally turns to him, there’s a look on his face that Eddie isn’t sure he’s ever seen before. His eyes are warm and a little sad, his eyebrows are slightly knitted behind the thick frames of his glasses. 

“You remember that?”

Eddie nods. He isn’t planning to say any more on the subject, he hadn’t even meant to say it out loud. But Richie’s still watching him, like he’s waiting for Eddie to finish. So he does.

“They beat the living shit out of him, just left him for dead down here. I don’t think anyone else remembers it but I think about it a lot.” He does. He doesn’t know why, either. People die here all the time and he doesn’t think about most of them. He chews his bottom lip a little before continuing. “I can’t help feeling like, I don’t know. Like I knew him, like I know what really happened to him. Like he was one of us.” 

Richie gets that shocked look on his face again, mouth hanging open a little as he stares hard at Eddie. Eddie’s surprised, too. He feels his face getting hot under Richie’s eyes but he doesn’t look away.

Richie sucks in his bottom lip just before he reaches out and slips his hand into Eddie’s. They stand like that for a while, Eddie isn’t really sure how long, their palms warm against one another and the soft sounds of the canal floating around them.

Eddie squeezes Richie’s hand in his and tugs.

“Let’s go.” 

“Yeah.”

Eddie climbs back up first, squeezing through the bars again before he straightens out and watches Richie follow him up onto the bridge. Richie throws a leg over the top railing and drops down before Eddie sees something yellow in his hand. He instinctually feels his back pockets even though he knows they’re empty.

“What the hell, Rich!” 

“Calm down, spaghetti, I’ll give it back. I just wanna see what you’re—” He ejects the tape and wriggles it out while he talks. He looks down long enough to realize what’s in his hand, and his face breaks into the biggest, dopiest smile. Eddie wants the ground to fucking swallow him. “—Where’d you get this?”

“None of your _beeswax_ , asshole.”

Eddie lunges forward and grabs the tape and the Walkman out of Richie’s hands. He focuses very hard on putting the tape back inside and wrapping the headphones in a neat wad.

“So what do you think of it?”

“I think it blows.”

Eddie looks up and catches Richie still beaming at him. He smiles back. They just stand there smiling at each other until Eddie’s face starts to feel tingly again.

“D’you wanna stay at my house tonight?”

“Thought you’d never ask, Eds.”


End file.
